The Return of the Mask – Superflu and Covid

The appearance of a new flu strain and the resulting health pronouncements and media coverage leading up to Christmas led to a resurgence of mask-wearing among the public. Those of us who have been Covid-19 cautious over the last few years were joined by a new group, shaken out of complacency by the emergence of the so-called “superflu,” and the public was suddenly reminded of the dangers of infection.

This was visible on public transport and even at a concert I attended before Xmas, where I am usually the lone masker. Interestingly, public health messaging, together with widespread press coverage, turned things around, and therein lies the rub: it’s precisely because of the lack of that coverage that the public continues to believe that Covid-19 is not serious or has gone away.

As Professor Christina Pagel (formerly of Independent Sage) pointed out, it was not a superflu but simply normal flu that arrived earlier than the normal flu season and hit the NHS and the public unaware. It is true that the virus mutated over the summer and that vaccine manufacturers were unable to produce a tailored vaccine in time, but that was not the main cause of the impact.

There were two main reasons the flu hit so hard. One was the low take-up of the vaccine, especially among the vulnerable, but also incredibly among NHS staff, where take-up was lower than in 2019 before the pandemic. All of this demonstrates the insidious influence of the anti-vaxxers, which we now witness playing out horrendously in Robert Kennedy’s US, where scientists have been sacked and access to many vaccines is curtailed – the latest being vaccines against meningitis in children.

However, with hospitals clogged with flu patients and the resulting media storm, there was a significant increase in flu vaccine uptake, to the point that many pharmacies ran out of stock. Indeed, it was the higher-than-average take-up which contributed (along with increased masking) to the tapering off of the wave as Christmas approached, although many experts said Christmas and New Year socialising may lead to a further wave.

The other issue neglected by the media, as part of its deliberate ignoring of Covid-19, is that many scientists have speculated, and there are scientific papers supporting the hypothesis that many immune systems have been dysregulated by Covid-19 (a vascular disease), leaving people more open to serious infections such as flu, particularly after an increased number of Covid-19 infections. This may be the real explanation for superflu: not that the flu itself was stronger, but that the ability to resist it had declined, leading to more serious pneumonia and other consequences.

Scientific research has repeatedly shown that increased Covid-19 infections impair T8 immune cells, which explains why many complain of constant illness. With many people experiencing 2 or 3 Covid-19 infections per year, Long Covid-19 is not the only danger; the immune system is also so damaged that we are open to a range of new infections, and any resulting illness takes longer to recover.

The unwillingness to confront the reality of Covid-19 leads to attempts to blame illness on everything else. The lesson of the superflu period this winter is that if the same effort and awareness were put into protecting the public from Covid-19, we would all be in a better place. The flu panic brought many people to greater awareness of their health and how to protect it through masking and other measures, but the real cuckoo in the nest remains Covid-19.

Its impact will continue to plague society, even as public health appears to have abandoned the field and the media ignores it.

Joseph Healy is a member of Anti*Capitalist Resistance.

The Return of the Mask – Superflu and Covid